Page 10 - LatAmOil Week 14 2020

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US Gulf Coast refiners often use storage depots near Cristobal (Photo: OilTanking.com)
More gasoline and diesel going into storage facilities in Panama
PANAMA appears to be turning into a popular destination for traders looking for places to store their excess supplies of petroleum products, especially low-sulphur motor fuels.
According to data from the oil analytics firm Vortexa cited by Argus Media, no less than 2.7mn barrels of gasoline and diesel arrived in Panama between April 1 and April 6. This is equivalent to about 460,000 barrels per day, or more than twice the full-month average of 190,000 bpd posted in March.
Additionally, the volumes of gasoline and diesel coming into Panama are outstripping the volumes going out of the country. Vortexa’s data show that local storage facilities took delivery of about 100,000 bpd in March. This is more than three times the amount departing these facili- ties, which averaged 30,000 bpd in the same month. The discrepancy was even more marked in early April, when arrivals averaged 210,000 bpd and departures stood at around 7,000 bpd.
Most of the gasoline and diesel that has been coming into Panama is production from refineries on the US Gulf Coast. The existence of storage depots in the Central American state
has allowed these plants to continue operating, though at less than full capacity, despite the decline in demand that has followed the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
US companies are not the only entities eyeing Panama’s storage capacity. Refinery operators in Taiwan, South Korea and India have been send- ing more fuels to Panamanian depots since they began ramping throughput back up last month, Argus Media reported. Most Asian refiners are using facilities in Balboa, on the Pacific coast, while their US counterparts have mostly turned to sites near Cristobal, on the Caribbean coast, it said.
In related news, Argus Media said sepa- rately that Panama had seen sales of marine fuel decline significantly year on year. In March, it reported, the Central American state sold less than 337,000 tonnes of marine fuel, down from about 449,400 tonnes in the same month of 2019.
It attributed the drop to the coronavirus pan- demic, which has led to widespread reductions in shipping traffic, and added that demand had fluctuated dramatically in March. ™
GUYANA
Guyana’s oil output up in January, FM says
GUYANA’S oil output jumped to 56,320 barrels per day in January, up 58.2% on the December figure of 35,607 bpd, according to a report from the South American country’s finance ministry.
The report noted that the government was
still in talks with the consortium producing
crude at the first stage of Liza, a field within the offshore Stabroek block. The parties are final-
ising the procedures they will use to calculate export prices for crude from the block, it said. 
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 14 09•April•2020